Pick the Father of America

Senator Trent Lott (R-MS):
“This is not Sunday School, this is interrogation, this is rough stuff.”
Talk show host Michael Savage:
“Instead of putting joysticks, I would have liked to have seen dynamite put in their orifices.”
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK):
“I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.”
Talk show host Rush Limbaugh:
“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?”
White House counsel Alberto Gonzales:
“The Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice has opined that, as a matter of international and domestic law, GPW [Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War] does not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda.”

In a review of Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer published in the May 27, 2004 issue of The New York Review of Books, Edmund S. Morgan relates two episodes from the book. After the Battle of Long Island, Hessian and Highland troops bayonetted unresisting rebel troops. After the Battle of Princeton, American officers watched as their wounded troops were murdered by British infantry.

Despite this, General George Washington gave these orders to the officer placed in charge of the 211 prisoners taken at Princeton:

“…treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”

I guess that sort of points out the difference in moral character between the father of our country and the morons influencing things these days.